Main Street, Oil On Canvas, 18" x 24"
Elizabeth Johnson: Almost everyone immediately feels Edward Hopper in your paintings through your use of light, shadow, and architecture. For example, Main Street echoes Hopper's famous Early Sunday Morning. Your work Great Taste expands the frontal impact of a Hopperesque street corner by contrasting the careful placement of car, figure, trash can, and light pole with a blurrier distant house. You seem to inhabit and revitalize Hopper's style of loneliness, the way his figures feel so self-contained. As you work, do you think about distances and possibilities that might continue beyond or behind your constructed compositions?
Larry Francis: Hopper and the Ashcan School painters of urban life have had a strong influence on me. I work on constructing the space of a painting, building it forward toward the viewer, and exploring the receding space of the painting. This effort gives me a sense of the sculptural dynamic of the painted area.
Great Taste, Oil On Canvas, 18" x 24"
LF: I focus on composing the painting out of the elements I have selected for the composition, and some of them imply movement, like the two black cars in Great Taste. In contrast to Hopper’s use of single figures or of couples not engaging with each other, my painting Main Street includes many figures, more like some of the painters of the Ashcan School.
EJ: In your interview with Pete Sparber (Artblog.org, January 2025), you mention Richard Diebenkorn and Joseph Cornell as favorites who "don't do anything like my art." Yet, I recognize congruencies between your realism and Diebenkorn's exaggerated use of near/far and flat/dimensional, I love the central, green-tinged squarish shadow in Krams and Wilde that recalls Diebenkorn's realism-within-abstraction. While working, are you mindful of realistic detail competing with geometric simplification, especially after you have established the basic composition?
Entrance to the City, Oil On Canvas, 24" x 48"
LF: I want to feel that everything, every shape and each color, is in the right place, balanced but with some tension between the shapes and the colors. A painting in this show, Entrance to the City, is a good example. The additions of figures, poles, or of changing a shadow can be difficult decisions: they may add to the disjointed feel, or they may create a more harmonious whole. The added figures and red light harmonize with the larger red shapes of the two buildings on either side.
Things do get painted in and then taken out, over time. Usually, I am trying to get that spark that drew me to the original subject. At times, a happy appearance of a figure or shadow may work to make a painting more vital.
El Toro, Oil On Canvas, 12" x 16"
EJ: In our last ArtSync interview, you stated: "Most of the landscapes painted onsite are found compositions. I try to find geometry in what I’m painting, because it can determine the shape of the canvas and the viewpoint. Then I make small adjustments in the movable objects to improve or reinforce the geometry."
LF: Still true. I hope I have a finer sense of the possibilities in my search for subjects. It’s an ongoing task.
EJ: Would you compare your careful arrangements of objects and people to Joseph Cornell's stage-like approach of organizing information poetically? I feel the meditative power of self-possessed people walking dogs or doing errands in paintings such as Going to Work, Morning Stroll, View from Fleming Street, and El Toro. What makes you decide in some cases to add more people and street furniture to pictures such as Washington Square, Terrace and Cotton, and Chloe's?
Morning Stroll, Oil On Canvas, 9" x 12"
Leverington Looking Toward Belmont Hills in progress
LF: The human presence is the start, perhaps made into a street ballet. I try to find figures which move through the space. And here chance plays a part. I collage from photos I have taken, both present and past, and from chance encounters with people who enter and, sometimes, reenter the space I am painting.
EJ: You shared Leverington Looking Toward Belmont Hills after you worked on it more, and I notice a couple added in the middle of the piece. What was your path of thought between recognizing that the painting needed something and how the couple functions? Did you also work more on other areas of the painting?
LF: I can tell you that it was one of the last of the larger works I have been working on. I wanted more going on movement wise; I liked the way the couple continues the arc of the bridge moving to the left, while the biker goes off to the right. I also liked the addition of color and the way the shadows and light catch the couple. I did build up the paint in a few areas, perhaps in a way that might not affect the overall composition but might give a slightly stronger sense of light.
Larry Francis' Studio
EJ: If a “finished" painting requires both spark and things being in the right place, are there more strategies for provoking spark other than chance shadows or figures? For instance, would you alter the weather or time of day in a piece? Do you change the color of street furniture or clothing to suit?
LF: I would change the sky, cloud pattern, and color of objects, clothing, chairs, etc. In general, direction of light and time of day stay about the same for the life of the painting, the direction of the light usually being a critical part of why I settled on a particular subject. The consistency of the light direction is required to create the three-dimensional space, as I see it.
EJ: Sunset presents a long horizontal view in strong light that emphasizes a rustic, marshland setting, which I am guessing is a novelty for you, since you consider yourself chiefly an urban painter. A couple walking away from us and their glowing blue shadows on white clapboards dominate the scene. Yet a strange shape tacked in the notch of a tree and another figure with his back to us along with acute awareness of a day fading add peripheral meaning. Has painting lingering impressions of passing moments become more important as you mature as an artist?
LF: This was painted onsite at Burcham Farm, encircled by the Maurice River, near Millville, New Jersey, where art classes have been held for more than twenty years, through the Barn Studio of Art of Millville. This year was the last time when classes would be held at this site. Both the students and their teachers tend to be older folks. The fact that it was our last year there, and that most students are older, may have influenced the painting.
Sunset, Oil On Canvas, 24" x 72"
View from Fleming Street, Oil On Canvas, 36" x 48"
EJ: View from Fleming Street also seems to balance the presentation of different subjects to create mood. The composition joins a trickling hose, a woman and her dog in shadow, and a brightly lit Victorian house to make a triangle. A summer mood is set in motion by darkness over the hose and the thirsty dog and its bare-armed walker, the mood resolving when I view the sunlit house. Just looking at the house makes me feel hot. Do you think of your pieces in terms of dramas that unobtrusively complete themselves?
LF: In View from Fleming Street, the woman walking the dog and the water trickling from the hose are showing activity suspended, just acts of an ordinary day. I wanted the viewer to look out past the figure, the black fence, the silhouetted dog, and the dark pants, which help to emphasize the light on the view across the street. I worked on the painting many days in the summer heat.
Garden Wall, Oil On Canvas, 36" x 48"
EJ: Just the opposite, Garden Wall freezes time and limits our view, preserving flower beds and pots at peak perfection. The two chairs could be a chatting couple. Is this your backyard? You mention in the Sparber interview that family members living for generations around Yocum Street is a big inspiration. Do you prefer painting public over private spaces?
LF: I have not thought so much about painting public vs. private spaces. To expand my subject matter, I have been led away from personal spaces in the pursuit of new subjects.
Many aunts, uncles, and cousins of mine lived on Yocum Street, and I painted in their yards and gardens, as if they were my own. I really enjoyed painting Garden Wall, a bit of Elizabeth’s (my partner’s) garden. This is where we sit on many evenings, to share a drink. This painting is a view of the morning light with many plants and objects vying for attention and, perhaps, a dialogue between the two chairs.
Distant Thunder, Oil On Canvas, 9" x 12"
EJ: You conclude our last interview by saying, "My goal is to keep finding new subjects to paint, in the city and elsewhere, with a beautiful sense of light and some bit of life." Is there such a thing as too much life in a painting? For instance, Distant Thunder feels like an outlier for you since most of your quotidian drama in linked to casual people. If the Delaware flooded a Philadelphia neighborhood, would you be moved to paint it?
LF: As a painter you are, in the main, thinking of painting forms, making colors that work, arranging and measuring the intensity of light and shadow. I am always searching for what the city feels like. There can never be too much life in a painting. I am just scratching the surface.
Distant Thunder, which depicts the marshlands of New Jersey, is different from my city subjects. I had the idea of a windblown figure hurrying home before the rain, but instead, I opted for a darkened sky, phragmites leaning in the wind, and a lightning bolt, all evoking the sound of distant thunder.
Larry Francis sketching on Leverington Avenue
LF: I have done some etchings of flood subjects, and made drawings of high water along the Delaware, as well as an invented painting of a house in Yardley, Pennsylvania, submerged in river water. The house was painted onsite, and high water was added in the studio.
EJ: Do you link together all the versions of painting sites in your oeuvre? For instance, Mike and the Tree Shadow features a figure on the threshold of casting a shadow like the couple in Sunset. Would it be ideal to hang these pieces together, so they speak to and through each other?
LF: I don’t work in series, but occasionally I do return to some subjects. The show will dictate whether paintings from the same site hang together.
The pastoral subject of Burcham Farm is part of my exploration of further subjects. I have taught a landscape painting class at this site for the past eight years. It took some time before I developed painting subjects there that were meaningful to me. Both paintings include a wonderful tree shadow; in Mike and the Tree Shadow, the figure is in shadow, moving toward the light; in Sunset, the silhouettes of the figures become cast shadows on the building, in front of the tree shadow.
––Elizabeth Johnson
(elizabethjohnsonart.com)
edited by Matthew Crain
(@sarcastapics)
Mike and Tree Shadow, Oil On Canvas, 16" x 20"
Larry Francis painting in East Falls
Larry Francis is a Philadelphia native who has painted on the streets of the city from the early part of his life in art. He studied painting at PAFA, where he was awarded the J. Henry Schiedt European Traveling Scholarship in 1970. His first career solo show was held at the Peale House Galleries of PAFA in 1979.
Over the years, Francis has received a number of awards, including the Julius Hallgarten Prize from the Academy of Design, New York in 1972, the Mary Butler Award from the Fellowship of PAFA in 1996, the Charles Knox Smith Founders Prize at the Woodmere Art Museum in 2002 and a Prize for Painting at Cheltenham Art Center in 2011.
His work is in many public and private collections, including the Noyes Museum of New Jersey, Woodmere Museum in Chestnut Hill, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Federal Reserve Bank, Philadelphia. Francis is represented by Gross McCleaf Gallery, where he has had a dozen solo shows.
Larry Francis has been showing with Gross McCleaf Gallery since 1982, and is currently an instructor in painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied from 1967 to 1971.